CRIMINAL PURSUITS

“Didst thou think the war was over? ‘Tis not; it goes on as before,” an Army buddy of mine once wrote in an otherwise ribald poem. So it seems. The Cold War has a postnasal drip. Authors ingeniously find new changes to work on Us v. Them--changes which even find justification in the news, as with the recent Ames spy case.

What needs to be said about James Grady’s THUNDER (Warner Books: $21.95; 380 pp.) is that never was an indifferently written book so suspensefully entertaining. Grady, who wrote “Six Days of the Condor” and was once an investigative legman for columnist Jack Anderson, evidently knows the fiercely competing Washington intelligence bureaucracies like the back of his hand, with which he gives them a goodly swipe.

The time is now; a huge bomb has gutted a New York skyscraper. The longtime CIA partner of Jack Lang is killed by a seemingly stray bullet as they drive to work. Lang is now tamely doing liaison work between the agency and Congress.

A worse than burnt-out case, Lang spends much of the book in a dazed state, represented by an italicized stream of consciousness that resembles rough drafts of cables. ( “Easy. Go easy with her.” ) But no matter. Grady has a tale to tell and he gets on with it.

There are no stray bullets in crime fiction, except as conveniences during the finale. Lang’s partner was on to something, confiding in no one and wiped out before he learned more or told anybody. Did what he knew relate to the bombing? Lang’s explorations keep leading to victims of a villain who got there first. Lang is soon a target himself. There are erotic interludes, which seem like ritual dances in the marketplace, engendering no heat at all.

But as the bad guys (including a shrewd killer Lang refers to as Wet-boy) close in, Grady, as he did in “Six Days,” generates a large amount of what-next suspense.

The denouement confirms anybody’s dark fears about the consequences of all the secrecy in the intelligence establishment. As Pogo classically remarked, the enemy is us, although Grady appears to be glad that the CIA is on our side. The phrase from many a book jacket still lives: The novel is soon to be a major motion picture.

Tim Sebastian’s LAST RIGHTS (Morrow: $22; 280 pp.) involves something of the same kind of internal convulsions, this time on Their side. Amid the chaotic crumblings of the Soviet government, an archivist has fled the country with a trove of secret documents identifying key men in several governments, including the U.S. and the Soviet Union itself, for conspiring to keep the Cold War hot, to the greater benefit of the armaments industry worldwide.

The scene is Russia and London, where the defector has surfaced long enough to be murdered, his body found in a car belonging to the Russian-born mother of the first-person narrator, Edward Bell. His mother, who had done gulag time as a dissident before escaping to England, has disappeared. Bell himself is shot and wounded. Searching for Mama and the purloined documents propel the story, and do they ever.

Sebastian, a BBC correspondent in Moscow at the time of the dissolution, was expelled as a spy (a charge denied), and he captures Moscow past and present with high authenticity.

The task of telling a complicated story in the first person--the past and present both interwoven and notably complicated--was daunting, and Sebastian carries it off with a flair. Mama sounds like a Slavic version of Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude,” crafty, outrageous and devious, and Sebastian gets inside Bell and makes him a fully-realized individual. A recommended adventure.

Richard Hill has a doctorate and has been a carpenter and taught karate. He lives in Southern California and writes a private-eye series not quite like any other, in its seasonings of intellectual reference and its obeisances to Kerouac and other folk heroes of the ‘60s.

In SHOOT THE PIPER (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 196 pp.), Randall Gatsby Sierra, his low-energy protagonist, takes off for England in pursuit of one of his literary idols, Jack MacLeod, a dissolute charmer whose reputation rests on a single novel called “Road Hog.” MacLeod has vanished with a huge advance and what is thought to be the only copy of a new novel.

The chase, amusing, punctuated by a succession of bright eccentrics and leading to Wordsworth country in the Lake District, finds MacLeod keeping one jump ahead, leaving clues to his next stop and tales (legends in the making) of his bizarre, alcohol-fueled capers.

MacLeod addresses the Oxford Union (“Dear fellow decadent spoiled brats”) in a set piece, weird but not entirely idiotic, that confirms Hill’s intentions to use the private-eye form as a carrier for personal plays of spirit. The intentions are entirely welcome.

The Florida coasts, the Keys this time, continue to generate the steamy fictional excitement that once seemed a Southern California exclusive. In MEAN HIGH TIDE (Delacorte: $24; 371 pp.) James W. Hall’s protagonist is again Thorn, who only wants to be left alone to fish and dive and enjoy his lady love. But she dies--murdered underwater while diving for lobster.

Searching for the why leads to a madman breeding a rare fish which, endlessly multiplying, could feed the world or, of course, be the death of all the other fish in the sea. The madman’s seemingly captive daughter keeps seducing men to kill her father, but he keeps killing them first. The villain of Hall’s piece is no great mystery but the sense of time, place and character is great, the complications fascinating and the scaly Grand Guignol finale both improbable and pleasing.

Nevada Barr, a National Park ranger whose debut “Track of the Cat,” was a fine and atmospheric thriller about a woman ranger in peril in the Texas heat, relocates her Anna Pigeon on Lake Superior in A SUPERIOR DEATH (Putnam: $19.95; 303 pp.).

Storm-tossed on that dangerous lake in darkness in dank, chill weather, Pigeon yearns for a little unbearable Texas heat. Barr’s command of the milieu--the environment, the rough camaraderie of the rangers on their isolated island stations, bracketed by tourists on one hand, local fishermen and boat operators on the other--is stronger than the plot, involving treasure in the form of ancient wine and more deaths by diving, but a freshness of place is no bad thing. Barr (now stationed in Mississippi), builds to a vivid finish.

Ron Ely, one of the many former movie Tarzans and later an emcee of the “Miss America” pageant, has produced a competent if not quite ground-breaking first novel, NIGHT SHADOWS (Simon & Schuster: $20; 319 pp.). He is working Ross Macdonald country--Santa Barbara, where Ely lives, by its own name.

Jake Sands retires to a very pricey gated community to recover emotionally from the loss of wife and child, murdered in some as-yet unwritten previous caper. He finds a dying man outside his unit but tries to stay clear of any involvement; he’s had enough in his anti-terrorist work. But the community’s hard-nosed security chief, let alone a nasty local cop, won’t leave him alone.

Soon the premise and the premises are strewn with bodies, gangland links are disclosed, and the condo is in need of retrofitting with an equally solvent but better class of people.

Florida again, Miami this time, is the setting for the Arthur F. Nehrbass novel, DEAD HEAT (Dutton: $19.95, 327 pp.). (His first was “Dead Easy.”) It’s mob family time again, and the old don has dispatched Vincent Strollo, enforcer, loan shark and all-round success story, to early retirement in Florida because he’s become too interesting to grand juries and congressional investigators.

But it’s hard to keep a bad man down, and Strollo is soon wallet-deep in scams, the largest involving construction of a high-rise, which seems to be a skein of skimmings and loans backed by fake bearer bonds.

The good guy is the colorless head of the local FBI office, who is having to contend with a couple of murderous rogue agents as well as keep an eye on Strollo’s moves.

Nehrbass sets all this up very efficiently. The reader has been there before but presumably had no objections and won’t this time. The recruiting of debt-ridden or greedily ambitious patsies, the erection of the scams, the nice wife and the trusting cousins betrayed, the dames seduced by danger, and finally the family ties tightening garrote-like around Strollo’s neck--all swift and readable.

The ending resembles a Shakespearean all-points slaughter, with no courtier around to ask a blessing or sing the blues. Expert if impersonal, all the way through.